(NaturalNews) Japan's nuclear watchdog has now declared the leak of radioactive water from ***ushima a "state of emergency." Each day, 300 tons of radioactive water seeps into the ocean, and it's now clear that TEPCO has engage in a two-and-a-half-year cover-up of immense magnitude.

"I believe it's been leaking into the ocean from the start of the crisis two-and-a-half years ago," disclosed a 12-year TEPCO veteran named Suzuki-san (SOURCE)

"There are still reactor buildings we haven't gotten into yet," said another worker named Fujimoto-san. "So there's always the possibility of another explosion..."

TEPCO workers sprayed with wildly radioactive water while waiting for a bus

Just how out of control is the situation at ***ushima? It's so out of control that TEPCO recently had to admit 10 of its workers were somehow -- yeah, see if you can figure this out -- sprayed with highly radioactive water while waiting for a bus.

"The workers' exposure above the neck was found to be as much as 10 becquerels per square centimeter," reports Bloomberg.com

How exactly did highly radioactive water manage to find its way to a bus stop in the first place? TEPCO isn't sure. It's confusing with all those radiation alarms going off all the time. In order to concentrate, the company has found it's easier to just disable all the alarms and pretend nothing's wrong.

The TEPCO cover-up

To fully grasp the extent of the TEPCO denial, realize that only recently did the company finally admit that radioactive groundwater has been leaking into the ocean. This follows years of stark denials from the company, whose executes have exhibited a remarkable ability to deny reality even when their own workers are dying in droves from cancer.

It's no exaggeration to say that TEPCO's downplaying of the full extent of the ***ushima disaster has put tens of millions of lives at risk -- people who should have been warned about radiation but were denied that information due to the TEPCO cover-up.

"At this current time in July of 2013, ***ushima is 80 to 100x more expansive and more intense -- letting out about 100x more of the radiation of Chernobyl," reports Dr. Simon Atkins Phoenix Rising Radio on a BlogTalkRadio interview.

"The problem with ***ushima is that it's not only continuing for 865 days... I mean, let's wrap our minds around that for a second -- it has been leaking out radiation in increasing volumes for 865 days."

Japan is a society that shuns whistleblowers

Why has TEPCO been able to cover up the truth about ***ushima for so long? Because Japan is a society of mass conformity. The idea of keeping your head down and not "rocking the boat" is deeply embedded in Japanese culture.

Japan is not a nation of "rugged individualism" but of conformist acquiescence.

As a result, whistleblowers are shunned, and there is immense peer pressure to defend the status quo... even when it's a terrible lie. This culture of conformity at all costs is precisely what allows companies like TEPCO to continue operating extremely dangerous nuclear power plants with virtually no accountability.

While Japan has entire museums dedicated to the horrifying history of two Japanese cities being bombed by the United States at the end of World War II, when Japan's own power company is involved in a radiological disaster of similar magnitude, the entire incident gets swept under the rug. Radiation? What radiation? If the government says there's no radiation, then there's no radiation! After all, it's invisible!

Why the U.S. government plays along with the cover-up

The U.S. government, of course, plays along with the charade because its own top weapons manufacturer -- General Electric -- designed and built the ***ushima Daiichi power plant in the first place. And the design decisions made by GE, such as storing spent fuel rods in large pools high above the ground, now look not just incompetent but downright idiotic. It turns out there was never any long-term plan to dispose of the spent fuel rods. The idea was to just let them build up over time until someone else inherited the problem.

So while Japan and the USA play this game of "let's all pretend nothing happened," citizens of both countries continue to be exposed to a relentless wave of deadly radiation that now dwarfs the total radiation release of Chernobyl (which the U.S. media played up in a huge way because the disaster made the Russians look incompetent).

The only reason TEPCO is finally getting around to admitting the truth in all this is because you can't rig all the Geiger counters forever. Radiation follows the laws of physics and atomic decay, not the whims of lying politicians and bureaucrats. As a result, the real story eventually comes out as we're starting to see right now.

The ***ushima disaster is likely to get far worse, if you can believe that

The upshot is that the ***ushima disaster is not only far worse than you've been told; it's very likely going to be worse than you could ever imagine. The radiation leak isn't plugged, in other words, and another explosion -- which many experts believe might be imminent -- would release thousands of times more nuclear material into the open environment.

Ultimately, the entire Northern hemisphere has been placed at risk by a bunch of corporate bureaucrats who thought building a nuclear facility in the path of a sure-to-happen tidal wave was a fantastic idea. Instead of acknowledging the problem and working to fix it like a responsible person would, our world's top politicians and ass-coverers have decided it is in their best short-term interests to play along with the TEPCO fairy tale which ridiculously pretends that radioactive leaks can be controlled by wishful thinking.

Why do you even bother living, since the **** is gonna hit so big and so bad? Do you really believe you'll sail right through?

The fact that you're still around tells me that your whole "coming down the road" schtick is just that. You're primarily here to try to scare the bejeebus out of some folks, then you can helpfully offer them advice at only $29.95 a pop (to start).

Rather I sail right through or not is not the issue nor my concern. I take some sensible precautions and if they get me through a rough time with a modicum of comfort fine but I am not such the fool to think I can determine when I die.

THE LATEST NEWS FROM NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - good enough source for ya Wags

Patrick J. Kiger
For National Geographic
Published August 21, 2013

In the latest crisis to strike the ***ushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) has discovered that 300 tons (nearly 72,000 gallons) of highly radioactive water has leaked from a holding tank into the ground over the past month.

The development comes on top of TEPCO's admission last month that an estimated 300 tons of radioactive groundwater, which picks up small amounts of contamination when it flows through the damaged reactor buildings, has been leaking into the Pacific Ocean every day. (See related story: "***ushima's Radioactive Water Leak: What You Should Know.")

The new storage tank leak presents a different and potentially more serious problem than the ongoing groundwater flow leaks. The water from the leaking tank is so heavily contaminated with strontium-90, cesium-137, and other radioactive substances that a person standing less than two feet away would receive, in an hour's time, a radiation dose equivalent to five times the acceptable exposure for nuclear workers, Reuters reported. Within ten hours, the exposed person would develop radiation sickness, with symptoms such as nausea and a drop in white blood cells.

A More Hazardous Leak

The latest leak comes from one of the massive array of 1,000 above-ground storage tanks built inside the plant by TEPCO, which store water that deliberately has been pumped into the damaged reactors in an effort to cool the nuclear fuel inside and prevent a meltdown. Such water is heavily contaminated and dangerous compared with the larger radioactive groundwater flow problem, which scientists say does not pose an immediate health hazard to humans (though it has made some types of fish from the area unsafe for consumption).

The Japanese government's Nuclear Regulation Authority is calling the leak a "serious accident" and wants to raise the official threat level from 1 to 3 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale—the highest level since the level 7 rating given when the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami severely damaged the facility. (See related "Pictures: The Nuclear Cleanup Struggle at ***ushima.")

While about two-thirds of ***ushima's storage tanks are welded steel vessels, the leaking tank is one of about 350 improvised temporary tanks that TEPCO has employed to augment its capacity. The temporary tanks are made of steel plates bolted together with plastic packing materials to seal the seams, and apparently are more vulnerable to leaks. A TEPCO official told The Japan Times, an English-language daily, that there have been four previous leaks in the temporary tanks. Unlike the previous ones, this leak somehow went undetected by plant workers for as long as a month. During that time, it leaked an estimated ten tons (about 2,400 gallons) of highly radioactive water per day. (See related photos: "A Rare Look Inside ***ushima Daiichi.")

TEPCO hasn't yet found the precise leakage spot or spots on the faulty tank, which according to Reuters is located just 550 yards from the ocean. But the company said that workers have pumped all of the water from inside a small concrete containment area where the leaking tank is located. In the event of rain, they plan to continue running the pump, which they say is powerful enough to keep rainwater from flowing out of the containment.

TEPCO said on Wednesday that tests of seawater from a ditch near the leaking tank didn't show any significant increase in the amount of cesium-137 and other radioactive materials, suggesting that the highly radioactive water isn't directly reaching the ocean. However, the possibility remains that the contaminated water might be mixing into groundwater that flows through the plant site into the ocean. In mid-July, levels of radioactive cesium-137 and cesium-134 from monitoring wells inside the plant unexpectedly surged nearly 15-fold, a phenomenon that scientists have been unable to explain. (See related story: "One Year After ***ushima, Japan Faces Shortages of Energy, Trust.")

Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist as the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts who has studied radiation leakage from the ***ushima plant, said he is concerned about the lack of data on levels of strontium-90 in the waters off ***ushima. He said that the groundwater now leaking into the Pacific—including, possibly, some contamination from leaking tanks—might now have much higher levels of that particular substance. Strontium-90 has potentially greater health risks than cesium isotopes because it becomes concentrated in the bones of fish and humans, he said.

'No Time to Waste'

The new problem further escalates the dilemma faced by TEPCO, which already has been struggling to find a way to deal with massive amounts of water contaminated with various radioactive substances at the site. When the company belatedly revealed last month the daily leakage of radioactive groundwater into the Pacific Ocean, a problem that outside scientists have long suspected, public confidence in TEPCO's ability to manage the cleanup threatened to erode further.

The development prompted Japanese government officials to step in and take a more direct role: The government announced last week that it is considering spending 50 billion yen ($410 million) to finance construction of a frozen soil barrier—also known as an ice wall—in an effort to block the groundwater from the plant from reaching the ocean. (See related story: "Can an Ice Wall Stop Radioactive Water Leaks From ***ushima?") That technology has long been used in the mining and construction fields, and reportedly performed well in containing radioactive water in a U.S. government test project in the early 1990s, but has never been used on a large scale at a nuclear power plant.

"This leak is very serious," said Dr. Janette Sherman, an Alexandria, Virginia-based physician who specializes in radioactive and toxic exposure. Dr. Sherman, who edited an in-depth study of health effects on cleanup workers in the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union, said she is concerned that the cleanup crew at ***ushima Daiichi may face long-term health risks. She also raised the prospect of the radiation's as-yet unknown effects on fish and other marine life in the Pacific.

Buesseler said he was concerned that the high level of radiation from the leaking tank might just be a harbinger of what is to come if more of the other temporary tanks begin to fail. But he's even more worried by revelations of leaks and other problems at the plant, which lately have been coming with dismaying frequency. "There is still a lot of contamination at ***ushima—in the land, in the buildings, and now from these tanks," Buesseler said. "Every bit of news that we've been getting is that the [radioactivity] numbers are going up."

"I'm becoming less confident that [TEPCO] can contain the problem," he said.

Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority shares Buesseler's concern, warning that the latest leakage problem might be beyond TEPCO's ability to cope. "We should assume that what has happened once could happen again, and prepare for more," watchdog chairman Shunichi Tanaka told a news conference, BBC News reported. "We are in a situation where there is no time to waste."